Last night, Mike Trout went 3-for-6 with a double, a homer, two runs, and an RBI. The Angels won, 8-2, over the Blue Jays, but let’s get back to that home run. Here’s what Mike Trout’s body looked like just moments before making contact with a pitch that went over the left field fence:

We all know what a typical home run swing looks like, and it sure doesn’t look like that. We also know what a normal baseball player looks like, and it sure doesn’t look like Mike Trout.

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A 13th-round pick last year, infielder Max Schrock — received by Oakland today from Washington in exchange for left-handed reliever Marc Rzepczynski — has made something of a name for himself by putting up strong offensive numbers in the lower levels. He’s hitting .333 between two levels of A-ball this season, largely due to an 8% strikeout rate. That’s encouraging coming from a middle infielder with speed and decent power. As a result, he’s become a regular on Carson Cistulli’s Fringe Five column.

Despite his strong performance, KATOH isn’t a huge fan of Schrock. My system pegs him for 2.9 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 2.8 WAR by the method that integrates Baseball America’s rankings. That puts him in the #150-#200 range in terms of prospects. To help you visualize what his KATOH projection entails, here is a probability density function showing KATOH+’s projected distribution of outcomes for Schrock’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

While Schrock’s hitting has been very good, KATOH dings him for being just 5-foot-8, and also for playing second base rather than shortstop. Second baseman with good numbers in the low minors don’t pan out all that often. There are some obvious exceptions to that statement, but it’s worth pointing out that those exceptions all provide defensive value, while Schrock has been eight runs below average at second base, according to Clay Davenport’s numbers.

To put some faces to Schrock’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the undersized second baseman. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Schrock’s performance this year and every A-ball season since 1991 in which a batter recorded at least 400 plate appearances. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.

As Dave Cameron pointed out, Rzepczynski is a mediocre left-handed reliever, and a month of his services probably could have been had for next-to-nothing. Schrock probably won’t win any MVP awards, but there’s a pretty decent chance he’ll be a useful role player in a couple of years. That’s demonstrably more than next-to-nothing.

One of the recurring themes over the last year has been the high price the market is putting on relief pitchers. Ken Giles and Craig Kimbrel brought back monster returns in trades last winter, while even decent middle relievers were getting two or three year deals as free agents. At last month’s trade deadline, Aroldis Chapman got the Yankees a terrific haul. It’s clearly a good time to be selling relief pitching.

And today, it looks like those rising prices have trickled down to mediocre lefty specialists, as the Nationals gave up a legitimately interesting prospect for a five week rental of Mark Rzepczynski. The guy nicknamed Scrabble is a useful situational reliever, having held lefties to a .270 wOBA in his career — don’t put any stock on his 2016 reverse split, which is all BABIP driven — but he’s useless against righties (.351 career wOBA allowed) so he’s effectively a one out guy.

Of course, the Nationals already have exactly this kind of pitcher in Oliver Perez, who they signed for $7 million over two years last winter. Perez hasn’t been as good as they hoped this year, and has been particularly bad lately, getting torched for a .473 wOBA in August. But he’s still held lefties to a .316 wOBA this year after keeping them to just a .230 wOBA last year, and is at .306 for his career; you’d have to really overreact to five bad innings in August to think that the Nationals needed to give up real value to improve their lefty specialist for the playoffs.

For the right to marginally upgrade their LOOGY, a guy who might face four or five batters in an entire playoff series, the Nationals surrendered a 21 year old currently running a 131 wRC+ in high-A ball. Max Schrock isn’t an elite prospect or anything, but he’s been a fixture on Carson’s Fringe Five all year, based on his strong contact rates and at least a little bit of power. As a diminutive second baseman, it’s easy to look at Schrock as a limited upside guy, but with Jose Altuve on the verge of getting AL MVP votes, we should remember that the idea of firm upside ceilings are much less concrete than is often thought.

Schrock’s more likely future is as a bench bat, but even if he’s just Alberto Callaspo 2.0, giving that up for a marginal gain in lefty specialists seems weird.

So why did the Nationals do this? Well, the deal was announced as Rzepczynski and cash for Schrock, so presumably, Oakland is paying some of the remaining ~$800K or so left on his contract this season. But according to sources in the game, Rzepczynski actually cleared waivers before this trade was completed, so the Nationals could have simply had him for just a the waiver fee, and kept a legitimately interesting prospect in their system.

So, effectively, the Nationals just sold a decent prospect for some cash savings in order to bolster the least important part of their bullpen. I know the value of relievers is going up, but deals like this still seem silly to me. Maybe Scrabble will get a big out or two in October and it will seem worth the long-term cost, but Rzepczynski seems like the kind of guy the Nationals should have gotten for next to nothing. When the market is inflating reliever prices to the point you have to give up a legitimately interesting 21 year old for a five week rental of a LOOGY, maybe it’s just time to stop paying market prices for relievers and go with what you already have.

Andrew Miller made a batter look silly last night. Andrew Miller makes batters look silly most nights, but last night, a batter looked particularly silly. One surefire way to identify a batter who just got done looking silly is to check whether he’s laying down in dirt right after he swung. Let’s see.

Q: Was This Major Leaguer Laying Down in the Dirt Right After He Swung?

A: Sure was

That there batter sure looked silly. The good news for Khris Davis is, he’s not alone. He didn’t even take the season’s most ill-advised swing against Miller. As our own Jeff Sullivan pointed out back in May, maybe the thing Miller does very best is force hitters to take ill-advised swings, at least certainly relative to the ones they don’t take. I’ll explain. When Jeff wrote his article in May, Miller’s O-Swing% against was higher than his Z-Swing% against, making him the only pitcher in baseball with such a distinction. To translate that into English: batters were swinging at would-be balls from Miller more frequently than they were swinging at would-be strikes. That’s not how hitting is supposed to work.

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The Reds are bad, and the Dodgers just clobbered them. As a part of that clobbering, Adrian Gonzalez socked three dingers. Here, you can watch them all! Each is impressive in its own way, I suppose. They’re most impressive as a group.

There was a time when Gonzalez’s power was absent. He hit three home runs in April. He hit three home runs, combined, in May and June. The fairly obvious culprit was a back injury, and it takes no imagination at all to figure out how an achy back could affect a swing. Gonzalez got some treatment. He insisted his back felt better. The numbers still didn’t quite show up.

Now they’re showing up. From the looks of things, Gonzalez is indeed healthy again, and it simply took him a short stretch to re-find what previously had made him successful. Adrian Gonzalez is looking like Adrian Gonzalez again. The most compelling evidence is probably what follows, as drawn from Baseball Savant. Here are nearly two years of Gonzalez’s batted balls, as tracked by Statcast. This plot shows rolling average launch angles.

That dip is impossible to miss, as an injured and compromised Gonzalez plummeted toward 0. He’s reversed that, again successfully putting batted balls in the air. And he’s once more hitting with authority. Here’s a rolling-average plot of hard-hit rate, and this doesn’t include Monday’s game, not that it would make a huge difference:

Gonzalez is getting his swing back, and he’s also showing a better ability to hit the ball hard to right. Of course, at his best, he’s been more of an all-fields threat — and Monday, he pulled two homers while sending another the other way. I know it was a day game in Cincinnati against the Reds, but big-league homers are big-league homers. Gonzalez can hit them again, and he can do other things, and suddenly he’s up to a 123 wRC+. That’s in line with where he’s been for a while.

The Dodgers are still playing without Clayton Kershaw. The Dodgers are still winning without Clayton Kershaw. The Dodgers, of course, would love Kershaw back, but since the All-Star break, Gonzalez has been a key part of what’s been the best offense in the National League. Kershaw’s important. He’s pretty far from being everything.

The Giants faced Noah Syndergaard Sunday night, and they tried to steal two bases. Both times, they were unsuccessful. That’s notable because Syndergaard, this year, has been horrible about controlling the running game. It’s been his one drawback — before Sunday, runners in 2016 were 40-for-44 in their attempts. The Giants assumed they’d be able to take advantage of his vulnerability. Plans went awry and for those reasons, and others, the Giants lost.

The first runner to get thrown out was Trevor Brown. Brown, as you might know, is a catcher. Before Sunday in the majors this year, Brown was 0-for-0 in trying to steal. He doesn’t run. He was trying to test the limits of Syndergaard’s weakness, and Brown got himself out, after Rene Rivera made a strong throw to second.

There’s nothing too interesting about that. Syndergaard was slow to the plate. Rivera did his job well. Brown got a bad jump and he doesn’t sprint well to begin with. That caught steal is almost a direct result of other players not getting caught stealing. The weakness encourages non-runners to run. Just as Syndergaard is slow enough that any decent runner can advance, some runners are slow enough that even Syndergaard can’t be exploited.

I’m more interested in the second runner to get thrown out. That was Eduardo Nunez, and, unlike Brown, Nunez has had a big year in swiping. He’s an obvious running threat. Here’s Syndergaard’s first pitch after Nunez reached:

And now, here’s the second pitch:

You see that? Nunez had seen enough. He read Syndergaard and took off on the second delivery. Rivera was excellent here — he was quick to his feet and his throw was outstanding. So, Rivera absolutely played a role. But Syndergaard also showed Nunez a twist. The first pitch:

The second pitch:

Syndergaard lowered his leg lift. He mixed up his timing, and while for the first pitch I had him close to 1.7 seconds to the plate, on the second pitch he was at almost 1.4. He shaved roughly 15% off his time, and though he was still short of the 1.3 mark that most pitchers want to achieve, that’s a healthy leap forward. Syndergaard gave Nunez a different look, and he gave his own catcher a chance. Nunez easily could’ve wound up safe if Rivera’s throw were any worse, but what matters is just that there was a possibility he’d be out. This is something Syndergaard’s been working on, and getting Nunez out is an encouraging step.

It’s going to take more outs before runners stop trying. And it’s worth noting that, when Syndergaard lowered his leg lift, he threw his slowest fastball of the first five innings. The Mets don’t want for him to sacrifice too much, and they need to keep an eye on his mechanics. But for the time being, Syndergaard is coming off an outstanding start, and in that start, runners trying to steal went 0-for-2. One of those runners even knows how to run. It’s something to build on.

Kevin Kiermaier missed a good chunk of the season after breaking his glove hand in late May, and that’s a shame, because when Kiermaier is in the field, he’s among the most exciting players in baseball. Kiermaier is must-see television with a glove in his hand. Decidedly less so at the plate. He’s been roughly a league-average hitter through 1,100 career plate appearances, and so it’s understandable that when we’re paying attention to Kiermaier, it’s usually for his defense.

But I want to flip the script for a minute. The Rays are bad, and Kiermaier missed time, and we’re usually paying attention to the defense, so this may have been easy to miss, but Kiermaier’s undergone some rather radical changes at the plate, relative to last season. Cutting to the chase:

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Back in May, we told you guys that we were teaming up with the Pitch Talks crew for a summer tour. We had our first event in Boston back in July, and it went really well, with a few hundred Red Sox fans packing the house for a fun evening with GM Mike Hazen, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, and a bunch of local writers mixed in.

In the next few weeks, the tour really picks up steam, however, with three events happening over the upcoming month.

First up, we’re heading to San Francisco in 12 days.

The Giants GM and play-by-play announcer will both be joining us at The Independent, and Eno Sarris and I will represent FanGraphs among a couple of panels of terrific writers. It’s going to be a good time, and is a steal at just $25. Buy your tickets now.

A week after that, Eno will be traveling to Toronto to take part in the next event up there, joining Jeff Passan and the local Blue Jays writers who have made the events up there so successful.

Then, finally, I’ll be heading to Chicago in September to meet up with Craig Edwards and a bunch of smart baseball folks from the windy city for an event at The Metro right around the corner from Wrigley Field.

Jonah Keri will be joining us for that one as well, and you’ll want to get your tickets before they’re gone, as that promises to be a fun show.

If you’re in SF on August 29th, Toronto on September 8th, or Chicago on September 22nd, make sure you come out and spend an evening talking baseball with a bunch of other die-hard fans. We’re looking forward to seeing you all there.

Clutch hitting isn’t that real of a thing. We don’t need to dwell on this, right? We’ve been over this so many times and I think we all share a common understanding. Sure, there’s room for clutch hitting to be a legitimate skill. Even when it might be a legitimate skill, it doesn’t make or break a player or team. The majority of what we observe appears to be luck, at least when it comes to significant over- or underachieving. That’s it. That’s where the conversation is.

So, boy, do I have a graphic for you! We have a win-expectancy-based statistic, known as Clutch. There’s Clutch for relief pitching, Clutch for starting pitching, and Clutch for hitting. In this plot, I’m showing 2015 team offensive Clutch, and 2016 team offensive Clutch. You should immediately notice two things. One, the distribution is random. Two, the Astros.

In offensive Clutch, last year, the Astros ranked second-worst. In offensive Clutch, this year, the Astros rank third-worst. So they haven’t been in the basement in either individual season, but when you combine them, then the Astros show up in last, and they’re buried. They have a combined offensive Clutch score of -13.8. Next-worst are the Brewers, at -8.7. That’s a difference of five wins. This is how unclutch Astros hitters have been.

Now, I should note the league average isn’t zero — it’s actually about -3 or -4. These numbers suggest that hitters overall are slightly unclutch, maybe because of advancements in bullpen usage. Anyway, between the Astros and the average would be something like 10 wins. That’s 10 wins over less than two full seasons. That’s 10 wins the Astros might have if their hitting had simply not been unclutch. I know I’ve already said it’s mostly random. I continue to believe it’s mostly random. Maybe a very small factor here is how the Astros strike out. But their offensive timing has just plain sucked. I don’t know how to explain it, but I do know how to observe it, and I’m sure it’s frustrated the clubhouse and the whole organization.

Since the start of last season, the Astros rank first in baseball in team OPS in what Baseball-Reference considers low-leverage situations. Bump it up to medium leverage, and the Astros rank 19th. Go all the way to high leverage, and the Astros rank 25th. In a sense that would be the explanation, but that doesn’t really explain things as much as it just re-states them. What we know about is the bad timing. If not the strikeouts, it could conceivably have something to do with general player inexperience. But I’m here grasping at straws. If there’s anything to research, it’s beyond what I can do in a small amount of time. Let’s just agree to end here today.

Last season, the Astros finished second in the AL West, two games out of first. This season, they’re in the hunt, but off the pace for the wild card. Who knows how things could be? Who knows how things could’ve been? Timing isn’t everything, but it’s an awful lot of it.

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.