The White Sox announced their presence as potential contenders by getting off to a 23-10 start, the best record in the American League through May 9. Since then, things haven’t exactly gone well:

Over the last month, the White Sox have gone 7-20, plummeting to fourth place in the American League Central and dropping their playoff odds below their Opening Day mark.

They’re still just 3.5 games back in a crowded division, though, and the season is far from over. General Manager Rick Hahn is aware of this, and so moves are being made. First was the acquisition of James Shields. Then came the Justin Morneau signing, and the subsequent DFA of Mat Latos. Now this:

#WhiteSox have designated Jimmy Rollins for assignment to make space for Tim Anderson.

— Dan Hayes (@CSNHayes) June 10, 2016

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Rangers RHP Michael Matuella entered his junior year at Duke as a candidate for the first overall selection in the 2015 draft. A torn UCL in March of that year dashed those hopes and Matuella eventually fell all the way to the Rangers at 78th overall. He signed for a $2 million and had been rehabbing in Arizona until Wednesday, when he faced opposing hitters for the first time in an Extended Spring Training game against the Reds.

Matuella threw his fastball at 93-96 mph after having also sat in that range during live batting practice for me last week. He threw a few curveballs in the low 80s — all below average — and his arm action lacked conviction. This was an issue for Matuella when I saw him throw that live BP session last week, as well, and coaches both then and today were urging him to “pull down” to create more downward spin on the breaking ball. During live BP, Matuella made the adjustment and his curveball was subsequently more effective. Wednesday, in just two innings of work — the first of which was fastball-only — he didn’t really have the opportunity to make the same sort of adjustment. I think that, with a combination of additional reps and greater confidence in the health of his arm, Matuella’s curve will develop into an above average — and potentially plus — pitch.

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After just two pitches on Wednesday, Vince Velasquez had to be removed. Sometimes, when a pitcher gets injured, you don’t really see the symptoms. Maybe there’s a little wiggling of the arm, or stretching of the shoulder. With Velasquez, it was immediately apparent something was wrong. The first pitch he threw:

That’s a fastball, at 86. The second pitch he threw:

That’s a fastball, at 87, and while Velasquez got the out, it was also the end of his outing. He didn’t seem to protest too much when he was visited on the mound, or when he was removed, and we already have some early word on the issue.

Phillies say Vince Velasquez left the game with right biceps soreness.

— Matt Breen (@matt_breen) June 8, 2016

For a little extra detail:

There were concerns about Velasquez’s shoulder when trade was made last December. https://t.co/o8AUtT3cHx

— Matt Gelb (@MattGelb) June 8, 2016

Nobody knows yet exactly what this means, though I might as well point out the Dodgers put Yimi Garcia on the DL with right biceps soreness toward the end of April. He’s out indefinitely, having been moved from the 15-day DL to the 60-day variety. Sometimes biceps soreness can be nothing, but other times, it can indicate a major complication, and you never want to see a power pitcher working eight ticks below where he usually is. Especially a power pitcher with Velasquez’s own injury history.

He’s already undergone Tommy John once, and his list of historical injuries is longer than that. This has always been the one big downside, the one reason Velasquez was ever available in a trade in the first place. For as long as Velasquez has been throwing, no one has doubted the quality of his stuff. But the Astros were unconvinced he could keep himself healthy, and the Phillies assumed the risk. When Velasquez is able to throw like he did against San Diego, the Phillies look like geniuses, but this is the coldest splash of cold water. It’s always been about health, and now Velasquez isn’t healthy.

With luck, he’ll be healthy again soon. In the best-case scenario, Velasquez requires just a little rest, and to be realistic the Phillies were going to have to limit his innings this season anyway. There’s a way for this to work out for everyone. Yet there’s definitely nothing good about a pitcher needing to be removed, and for now, the Phillies are holding their breath. Velasquez has provided an enormous reason to believe the team might be close to returning to relevance. He’s been one of the bright spots, and for as long as Velasquez is sidelined, the rebuild is a little off-track. Baseball continues to occasionally be a real son of a bitch.

Happy Jameson Taillon Day to you and yours!

The right-handed prospect is set to debut for the Pirates tonight in their game against the Mets. This has been a long time coming for Taillon, who was selected second overall way back in 2010. He sat out the entirety of the 2014 and 2015 seasons following Tommy John and then hernia surgery, but has pitched better than ever in Triple-A this year.

In 10 Triple-A starts this season, he’s recorded a dazzling 1.93 FIP, striking out 26% of opposing hitters and walking a mere 3%. Running those numbers through the KATOH machine, I get a projection of 7.9 WAR for Taillon over the next six seasons, which would have placed him fifth among pitchers on KATOH’s preseason list. Given his recent performance, there’s little reason to think Taillon won’t succeed in the show. In order to account for Taillon’s missed development time, it might make sense to knock a year off of his age when calculating his projection. Running him as a 23-year-old rather than a 24-year-old yields a forecast of 10.7 WAR.

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With Jorge Soler headed to the disabled list with a hamstring injury, the Cubs have summoned outfielder Albert Almora from Triple-A. It seems Almora, who bats right-handed, will play primarily against left-handed pitching for the time being. The 22-year-old gives Joe Maddon yet another talented hitter to work into his endlessly deep and potent lineup. Almora was hitting .318/.335/.444 in Triple-A with 10 steals and a 13% strikeout rate.

The Cubs selected Almora sixth overall out of high school back in 2012, and he immediately began generating prospect hype. Baseball America deemed him the 33rd- and 36th-best prospect in baseball in 2013 and 2014 respectively. However, he didn’t crack Baseball America’s list in either of the two most recent years, likely because he’s moved slowly through the Cubs system while putting up unspectacular surface stats. He hit .270/.291/.392 between High-A and Double-A in 2014 and then slashed .272/.327/.400 in Double-A last season. Those aren’t exactly knock-your-socks-off numbers.

Yet, despite his flaws, KATOH’s maintained hope in Almora. Over the winter, my system pegged him for 5.2 WAR over the next six years, making him the 46th-best prospect in the game. Adding his 2016 numbers into the mix, Almora’s projection jumps up to 7.4 WAR.

Almora’s projection is primarily driven by two factors: age and strikeout rate. Although it feels like we’ve been hearing about him forever, Almora’s still just 22; and he just turned 22 a few weeks ago. Furthermore, he’s kept his strikeout rate between 10% and 13% the past few years, which suggests he isn’t getting fooled often.

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Recently, we massively revamped our Player Graphs and are continuing to add more features to them. Today, we added several batted-ball and plate-discipline stats both for pitchers and batters in a new drop-down menu. In addition, it’s now possible to combine certain stats on the same graph.

Here are a few release notes for the update:

• We have added GB%, LD%, FB%, HH%, MH%, SH%, Pull%, Cent%, Oppo%, O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, Swing%, O-Contact%, Z-Contact% and Contact% to all batters and pitchers.
• We’ve added K% and BB% for pitchers.
• By using the drop-down menus, readers are able to mix and match up to five stats on a graph as long as the stats are on the same scale.
• Stats are on the same scale if they are formatted in the same manner. For example, K% and GB% are both percentages. A stat like wOBA, meanwhile, uses the traditional three-decimal format. K% and GB% can be plotted on the same graph while wOBA can’t be paired with either K% or GB%.
• Readers are able to reset and clear the chart by hitting the “Reset” button on the right side of the drop-down menu.
• If a stat is greyed-out in the menu, it can’t be added to the graph. Either the player doesn’t have data for that particular stat or the stat cannot be matched with other stats currently on the graph. You can click “Reset” to start over and clear the current graph.

With this new interface we’ll continue adding more stats and features.

Remember when it was the end of spring training, and the Orioles were exploring ways to not have Hyun Soo Kim be on the roster? My computer tells me it’s June 6, and I have reason to believe my computer, and if you set a low enough minimum, Kim owns the highest wRC+ in Baltimore’s lineup. He ranks 10th in all of baseball, and though that 10th sandwiches him between Tyler Naquin and Steve Pearce — it’s early — it’s not hard to draw parallels between 2016 Kim and 2015 Jung Ho Kang. Kim presumably isn’t this good, but he’s talented, and now he’s showing that he can hold his own against big-league competition. It didn’t look like that in March, but March has lied to us before.

Let’s dig into Kim just a little bit. He’s batted 78 times, and nearly every single one of those plate appearances has come against a righty. So, that’s a factor. And he’s hit a ton of ground balls. He has one home run, but if Kim keeps putting balls on the ground, that limits his power upside, obviously. Now, Kim hasn’t chased out of the zone very much. He’s also been better than average at putting the bat on the ball. And we can address the grounders head-on. With help from Baseball Savant, naturally.

Statcast doesn’t quite record every batted ball, but it gets most of them, and Kim ranks in the 88th percentile in average batted-ball speed. That seems great, but then there’s this: Kim has hit his grounders harder. As a matter of fact, Kim leads baseball in average grounder speed. Leads baseball! Higher than 96 miles per hour. It’s good to lead in a contact metric, but then, hard grounders aren’t necessarily better than soft grounders. Generally speaking, hard contact is nearly wasted on a ground ball.

That’s the downside — Kim hits hard grounders, instead of hard flies. Now here’s the upside of that downside. Kim also has baseball’s fourth-highest average grounder launch angle. That might sound kind of funky, but Kim’s grounders so far have an average launch angle of -3.3 degrees. The league average is -9.9 degrees. So of Kim’s grounders recorded, they’ve been closer to the line between grounders and line drives. Here’s how the league has done, in batting average, by grounder launch angle:

• -5 to 0 degrees: .315 average
• -10 to -6 degrees: .200
• -15 to -11 degrees: .154
• -20 to -16 degrees: .120
• -25 to -21 degrees: .082

The closer you get to a flat exit, the more productive the batted ball. And that’s intuitive, I think, because those are the most like line drives, and defenders have the least time to react. Here’s Kim against Dellin Betances last Friday:

That was recorded as a ground ball. As a bonus, that features Kim making solid contact against elite-level velocity, but the point is that while Kim hit a grounder, he really hit more of a line-drive grounder. And there’s evidence that could be a skill of his. If this were to keep up, Kim wouldn’t hit a bunch of dingers, but he would hit liners and he’d end up with a strong average and BABIP. He’s used a lot of his hard contact on grounders, which is bad, but those grounders have almost been like liners, which is good. You understand. You’re a smart person!

Not every Kim batted ball has been recorded, but on the 15 without Statcast readings, Kim has gone 5-for-15 with two doubles, so I don’t think we’re missing a bunch of horrible contact. And data points get dropped for every hitter. We can use only what we have, and for Kim, there’s a good thing about the bad thing. And, you know, maybe in time he’ll start to elevate the ball even more. I don’t know what he’s going to do, and last year Kang hit more fly balls after April and May. If Kim puts that contact in the air, that’s great. If he stays as he is, that’s fine. Hyun Soo Kim is looking like he can cut it. Take that, March.

In The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, the excellent new book by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, the authors served as the baseball operations department for the Sonoma Stompers, an independent league team in the Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs. The analytically inclined writers-turned-executives were given freedom to make roster, lineup and strategical decisions based on data, and among the most radical ideas explored in the book is the implementation of a five-man infield against an opposing player named Scott David.

The Stompers deploy a five-man infield against Scott David of the Pittsburg Diamonds, with Mike Jackson Jr. on the mound. (Source)

David is one of the best hitters in the league, one with seemingly no exploitable flaws in his approach, and the authors were struggling to come up with anything substantial to provide their pitchers in a scouting report. That is, until an off-hand remark was made about the possibility of enacting a five-man infield, and the realization that David was, in fact, the ideal candidate for the radical defensive alignment, for four key reasons:

1. He hits a bunch of ground balls
2. He sprays those ground balls all over the infield
3. He is an effective ground ball hitter
4. He has very predictable fly ball tendencies

As soon as I finished the chapter, I knew I needed to find Major League Baseball’s Scott David. Into the numbers I dove.

Using the FanGraphs leaderboards and BaseballSavant, I was able to put a number on each of the four tendencies above. Step one, ground ball rate, is simple enough to find. For step two, I calculated the difference between pull ground ball rate, and opposite-field ground ball rate to serve as a proxy for how often a player sprays his ground balls. For step three, I simply used ground ball OPS — no point in bringing in an outfielder if the player’s ground balls aren’t doing any damage. And for step four, I found the absolute value of a player’s pulled fly ball rate as a way to highlight predictable fly ball tendencies. Then I summed the z-scores of each of the four numbers to come up with a “Five-Man Infield Score.”

In the top five, we find guys like Eric Hosmer and Nori Aoki, but doing this to a lefty, as Lindbergh and Miller did, is admittedly more dangerous due to the exposure of the right field corner for an easy triple. Right-hander David Freese pulls too many of his ground balls; a normal infield shift will do the trick for him. Jean Segura is a decent candidate, though his ground ball rate and spray tendencies are not nearly as extreme as the number one name that pops up on our spreadsheet, far and away the most ideal candidate in Major League Baseball for the five-man infield: Howie Kendrick.

Look no further than his spray chart for convincing. The yellow dots are rough estimates of the optimal positioning against Kendrick in the proposed five-man infield:

Kendrick’s hit a ground ball on 65% of his balls in play, one of the highest rates in baseball. He hits them all over the infield, so shifting him with four infielders is impossible, and while Kendrick has been a pretty poor hitter this year, his OPS on ground balls is actually above-average, so there’s still hits to be taken away here. And as we can plainly see in his spray chart, there simply hasn’t been a need for a left fielder against Kendrick, so bring him in to play behind the second base bag, shift the the center fielder over slightly, and, voila! We’ve got a five-man infield, perfectly designed for Howie Kendrick, the only obvious candidate for a five-man infield in today’s MLB.

Now who’s going to be the first team to do it?

David Laurila published an interview with Lance McCullers last Friday. On Sunday, McCullers made his latest start, and here is about 1% of it:

Here is a view of the same thing happening, only taking place over a greater amount of time:

Good result. Good curveball! Nothing new there — McCullers tends to get good results, mostly because he throws a good curveball. His curveball bears a strong resemblance to that thrown by Craig Kimbrel, the difference being that McCullers is a starting pitcher, which is nuts. He’s not a two-pitch guy, but everyone knows the curveball is his weapon; as a rookie, his curve was worth about 18 runs better than average, while his fastball and change combined to be worth about -7.

You can’t learn a lot from one video clip. It’s always helpful to establish context. So, here’s the whole point of this. Last season, among starters, McCullers threw baseball’s hardest average curveball, by 0.1 miles per hour. In curveball rate, he ranked sixth. Good curveball, hard curveball, used it a lot. Moving on.

This season, among starters, McCullers has thrown baseball’s hardest average curveball, by 2.0 miles per hour. In curveball rate, he ranks first. He ranks first by more than seven percentage points. McCullers has thrown a curveball 49% of the time, and out of his five starts, his lowest rate is 42%. You think Rich Hill curveballs a lot? You think Drew Pomeranz curveballs a lot? They most certainly do, sure, but not like McCullers. No starter throws curves as often as he does, and no starter throws curves as hard as he does.

For what it’s worth, we have pitch-type information stretching back to 2002. The highest curveball rates on record for starters:

1. Lance McCullers, 2016, 48.5%
2. John Stephens, 2002, 46.0%
3. Phil Irwin, 2013, 41.9%
4. Pat Mahomes, 2003, 41.7%
5. Rich Hill, 2015, 41.5%

McCullers also ranks first in velocity, assuming this is a data glitch:

Compared to last year, McCullers has thrown plenty more curves. Statistically, that’s sensible, because the curve is his best pitch. Even now, the curve still has a strongly positive run value, while the other pitches don’t. It’s interesting to observe that the whiff rate at his curveball has only gone up, and rather substantially so. His fastball is like a secondary pitch at this point. Speaking of which — he’s throwing his fastball a little slower. He’s throwing his changeup a little slower. The curveball is harder. Part of this is probably just having a harder curveball, and another part is probably favoring the sharper curve over the loopier curve, as McCullers discussed with Laurila. He says he’s got two varieties of the breaking ball, and evidence suggests he’s been using more of the hard one.

So Lance McCullers is highly atypical. Or, he’s been so, so far. It’s worth noting it hasn’t all been good news — his ERA is over 4, in part because his walk rate has almost doubled. The strikeouts are up, and the grounders are up, but McCullers is searching for a groove. If and when he finds one, maybe it’ll feature fewer curves. Maybe the curves will be slower. I can’t tell you exactly where Lance McCullers is going to settle.

But the version we’ve seen this season? Haven’t seen a starter quite like this. Not, at least, for a long, long time.

A few days ago, the Giants lost Hunter Pence to the disabled list, weakening an already thin outfield, and making it likely that the team will have to start looking to the trade market to fill the hole at some point this summer. Then, Marlon Byrd got suspended for using PEDs, taking an outfielder off an Indians roster that was already weak in the outfield, forcing Cleveland GM Chris Antonetti to admit that they’ll probably start surveying the trade market for outfield help.

The problem, though, is that they’re going to join a pretty large number of contenders looking for outfielders. The Nationals are likely to be looking for an OF this summer, as Michael Taylor and Jayson Werth haven’t exactly inspired much confidence to this point. The Cubs could be in the market for an outfielder if Jorge Soler doesn’t start hitting fairly soon. The Red Sox probably won’t go with Blake Swihart or Brock Holt as their regular left fielder down the stretch, so they could be in the market for an outfielder as well. The Mariners probably wouldn’t mind a better option than Nori Aoki if they could find one. The White Sox could pick up an outfielder and move Melky Cabrera to DH, or move Austin Jackson to a fourth outfielder role if they found an upgrade in center field. The Orioles seem to not trust Hyun-Soo Kim, so when he cools off, he might get displaced as well.

Point being, there are a lot of potential buyers for outfield upgrades this summer. But the list of available outfielders, right now, looks pretty short.

The Brewers would move Ryan Braun, but first he has to prove he can stay in the line-up on a regular basis, which has been a problem lately. The contract, age, and PED history will likely scare off a number of buyers as well. Carlos Gonzalez should be available, but the Rockies have declined to move him the last few times he should been available too, so who knows what they’re going to do.

Jay Bruce is out there, but he’s a DH at this point of his career, and shouldn’t interest any team that cares about their pitchers. Ditto Matt Kemp, who is also running a .250 OBP and owed a crazy amount of money. Maybe the Braves would move Nick Markakis, except he’s not very good, and also overpaid. On the buy low side of things, the Rays could probably be talked out of Desmond Jennings, but he hasn’t hit in a couple of years now, and injuries seem to have sapped him of some of his athleticism.

Josh Reddick would probably be the best available outfield option for most teams, but he’s currently hurt. He should be back in time to serve as a decent July trade chip, but there’s also only one of him to go around, and certainly more than one team in the market for outfield help.

Given the lack of supply and the abundance of demand, it will probably make sense for teams on the bubble of contending to listen to offers for their productive outfielders. This could be the ideal time for the Yankees to get maximum value for Brett Gardner, for instance, or for the Rockies to put Charlie Blackmon on the block. With the current state of weak outfields on contending teams and not a great crop of outfielders available in trade, there may be an opportunity for a team to get a nice package for any kind of decent outfielder. There just don’t look like there are that many decent outfielders out there to be had right now.