Team FanGraphs defeated Team RotoGraphs, 13-12, on a walkoff single by managing editor Dave Cameron off opposing pitcher Brad Johnson, scoring Craig Edwards in the middle of a field at Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. FanGraphs editor Paul Swydan was named the game’s MVP, mostly for an athletic jump over a thrown wiffle ball while advancing to third base.

What follows are two Very Important Highlights, taken from the author’s Snapchat account.
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J.D. Martinez broke his elbow Friday night, leaving an already depleted Tigers outfield even further depleted. Martinez is expected to miss 4-6 weeks according to MLB.com, and the team has called up Steven Moya to replace Martinez in the lineup. If Moya can be the best version of himself, the Tigers might not actually miss Martinez all that much.
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We’ve entered into the Statcast era, but just before the Statcast era, we had to make do with more subjective evaluations. Among the evaluations was the Fan Scouting Report, a Tangotiger project to crowd-source player defense. One of the categories to be evaluated as part of the Fan Scouting Report has been arm strength. Okay, so, getting to the point, Ben Revere became a big-league regular in 2011. I looked at all the reports for outfielders who were regulars between 2011 – 2015, splitting into individual player-seasons. This is a five-year window, yes? I sorted all the players in ascending order of perceived arm strength. I isolated the worst 20. Here’s how many times the following players appear in the worst 20:

• Ben Revere: 5 times (out of a possible 5 times)
• Coco Crisp: 4
• Juan Pierre: 3
• Carl Crawford: 1
• Curtis Granderson: 1
• Jacoby Ellsbury: 1
• Jon Jay: 1
• Khris Davis: 1
• Nate McLouth: 1
• Nyjer Morgan: 1
• Raul Ibanez: 1

Overall, combining the seasons, Revere rated second-worst in arm strength. He also tied for worst in arm accuracy, so, you know, that sucks. Revere has a weak arm, relatively speaking, and he’s always had a weak arm, relatively speaking, and this is all to establish the setting. Revere is a center fielder who can barely throw, and that’s why Miguel Montero went and tried to tag up on a routine fly near the track.

“Bold,” is one thing you could say. “Disrespectful” would be no less accurate. Montero clearly didn’t respect Revere’s throwing arm, and, well, there’s really no reason to. But this time Revere got the last laugh, and it’s not like his throw was even particularly impressive. It was off-line and short of the bag, but Montero might’ve spent too much time thinking about Revere’s arm and too little time thinking about the fact that he himself is a 32-year-old catcher. Yeah, Revere has gotten a lousy rating out of 100 in arm strength. Montero just last year got a 25 for his speed.

The best part of all: Statcast era, right? I asked Daren Willman about the Statcast reading for Revere’s assist, which was his first of the season. Willman:

Doesn’t look like the system captured the MPH for that throw…

Even Statcast doesn’t know what to do with a Ben Revere outfield assist. The entry’s blank. As blank as Joe Maddon’s mind grapes.

Revere now has as many assists this year as Jason Heyward.

At the very end of the most recent episode of FanGraphs Audio, host Carson Cistulli and guest Dave Cameron were bantering about players whose primary offensive skill was once thought to be limited to controlling the strike zone and making contact, but who have since added plus power while maintaining most of that strike zone control — guys in the mold of Jose Altuve, Matt Carpenter, Mookie Betts or Xander Bogaerts.

During this conversation, Cistulli submitted an anecdote that made my ears perk up:

Carson Cistulli: This is uber-anecdotal, but I do feel as though we see more players going from this high-contact, control sort of skill set and developing power from that direction than, say, the Joey Gallo skillset, where the power is obvious but the ability to make contact — I feel like those players do not grow into contact.

Dave Cameron: I think that’s absolutely true. Contact rate is something that is very difficult to change. Your swing is kind of your swing, to some regard. You can change it, but it does not appear that players have as much ability to shift from a Giancarlo Stanton-level contact ability to a Mookie Betts kind of contact level. We just don’t see those dramatic changes.

CC: And it’s your brain, too, right? Isn’t your brain involved in that?

DC: Yeah, it’s like how fast your mind fires when it sees a pitch and how well it picks up the spin of the ball and the location of the ball, and it tells your hand-eye coordination and how quickly you can get the bat through the zone. There’s a lot of neuroscience that goes into that ability.

It’s an interesting conversation for a number of reasons — namely the distinction between innate vs. physical abilities — but the reason it made my ears perk up is because I’d just been thinking about Joc Pederson, who’s currently doing the exact sort of thing Cameron and Cistulli submitted was more difficult to do.

Pederson was a polarizing figure as a rookie in 2015 thanks to his red-hot start, his dreadful second half, and perhaps more than anything else his three-true outcomes approach at the plate which, after the All-Star Break, resulted in countless whiffs and very few homers. It’s the exact sort of skillset that fanbases tend not to appreciate, because nothing looks uglier than a swing and a miss.

What isn’t ugly is this:

Largest improvements in contact rate

1. Joc Pederson, +9.0%
2. DJ LeMahieu, +6.2%
3. Brett Gardner, +6.2%
4. Didi Gregorius, +6.0%
5. Kris Bryant, +5.8%

That’s every qualified hitter from 2015 to 2016, and Pederson’s lead is enormous. Last year, Pederson had the second-worst contact rate in the league, within spitting distance of Ryan Howard. This year, he’s climbed nearly all the way to league-average, making company with guys like Carlos Correa and Starling Marte.

And Pederson hasn’t traded any of his power for this newfound contact. Rather, he’s added power.

This plot nicely ties together the strides Pederson’s made at the plate:

That’s Pederson way up top in the yellow, the most encouraging dot in the entire image, unless you’re partial to DJ LeMahieu’s place to his right.

You’ve got to love what Pederson’s doing. The interesting thing is that his season wRC+ (117) is essentially unchanged from last year’s (115), due mostly to the fact that his walk rate has taken a bit of a hit. Goes to show that walks are valuable, too, and so was last year’s version of Pederson. This year’s version is just what people wanted to see.

Just over a month ago, I led one of my Sunday Notes columns with Jon Perrin and his microscopic walk rate. At the time, the 22-year-old Milwaukee Brewers prospect had issued just one free pass in 36 innings. He had 47 strikeouts.

A few days later, Perrin was promoted from Low-A Wisconsin to High-A Brevard County. His numbers with the Manatees aren’t quite as eye-popping, but they’re still impressive. On the season, Perrin has now issued seven walks over 71 innings. The Oklahoma State alum has 77 strikeouts and a 2.66 ERA between the two stops.

His numbers were only part of the story. An aspiring attorney, Perrin had taken the LSAT and was awaiting word on a law school application. Despite his success on the diamond, he was possibly going to be hanging up the spikes.

As Perrin put it in May, “If I get into Harvard, I’m probably going to be out of here. I love the game, but I think I can do more good in this world with a degree from Harvard Law School than I ever could playing baseball.”

He’ll have to settle for baseball (at least for now). Perrin learned earlier today that he wasn’t accepted at Harvard Law.

We’re given a few things. One, Salvador Perez is rather newly 26 years old. And he’s a catcher, and you know how they develop. Two, Perez is running what would be a career-high strikeout rate. Three, Perez is running what would be a career-high isolated slugging. We’ve seen this before, and the speculation is almost always the same. Is Perez starting to trade some of his contact for power? He wouldn’t be the first to go down that path, even if it seems like a particularly anti-Royals thing to do.

By no means has Perez been powerless in the past. Last year he socked 21 dingers! The year before, 17 dingers. The year before that, 13 dingers. But there could be more in there, and there’s no ignoring the signs. I’m not coming up with things out of the blue; I’m just following the evidence. And now, here, have some more evidence. Using Baseball Savant, I looked at all the hitters who had at least 100 batted balls tracked in both 2015 and 2016. I calculated the changes in average exit velocity and average launch angle, and then I used some simple math to find the biggest overall changers. Here are the top five, in the more-power direction. These guys have hit the ball harder, or lifted the ball more, or both.

Based on z-scores, Espinosa is up a combined 3.8, while Perez is up a combined 3.7. So maybe this could just as easily be a post about Danny Espinosa, but Perez is more interesting to me. With a batted-ball-speed increase of 3.4 miles per hour, Perez ranks fifth-best in the pool. And with a launch angle that’s increased by 6.1 degrees, Perez ranks seventh-largest in the pool. Having both things happening at once points in a direction, and that’s backed up by the increase in strikeouts. It’s not at all certain, but on appearances, Salvador Perez seems to be less of a contact hitter, and more of an extra-base-hit hitter. And after posting consecutive sub-100 wRC+ marks, he’s presently up at 120. He’s already cleared last year’s overall WAR.

This is an InstaGraphs entry, so I’m afraid I don’t have anything else. I’m going to monitor Perez for longer before I go into more detail. It’s always fascinating when a bat elects to begin a new chapter. That’s what it looks like Perez is doing, and though it could just be a fluke, it could also be the next stage of development for a potential franchise icon. The Royals have always loved Perez, from the beginning. It’s been easy to forget he wasn’t a finished product.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my favorite Andrew Miller fun fact. It’s no longer true, but, at the time, Miller was generating a higher rate of swings at would-be balls than he was generating at would-be strikes. That is, batters were making worse decisions than they’d make by flipping a coin. It was so absurd a fun fact it almost couldn’t possibly hold up, and it hasn’t, but it speaks to Miller’s early dominance in a way that few statistics could. It painted a picture of utter helplessness.

If that kind of thing is good for a pitcher, it stands to reason it’s bad for a hitter. Allow me to show you something. From our leaderboards, over the past 30 days:

Now that I look at this again, it’s weird to see Joe Mauer. Maybe there’s something to be written about Joe Mauer. But I want to focus on the first name, that being Rougned Odor. Odor hasn’t quite posted a higher O-Swing% than Z-Swing%, but he’s come dangerously close, and much closer than anyone else, among those qualified peers. Odor has that rate gap of six percentage points. Runner-up is at 16. Big difference. And small difference. You get it.

I wouldn’t say discipline has ever been Odor’s strong suit, at least not in the way we think of it. But he hasn’t before been this ugly for this long. He’s simultaneously over-aggressive and over-passive, and I don’t know if it’s possible to spin that in a good way. Let me take that back. No, it is not. It is not possible to spin that in a good way.

The split was over the past 30 days. What’s interesting is that Odor had a good start to the season. Through May 11, he owned a 125 wRC+. Since May 13, he’s posted a 38 wRC+, with one walk and 21 strikeouts. With something like this, the endpoints tend to be arbitrary, and it’s not like these endpoints aren’t arbitrary, but I will note that, on May 13, the Rangers began that home series against the Blue Jays, the series in which Odor delivered an urgent memo of disapproval to Jose Bautista’s face. If I wanted to read too much into that, I could suggest that Odor has been playing on emotion for weeks. In reality, it’s probably a random slump with convenient timing. Odor lost control of his discipline, just as he was losing control of his discipline.

There’s something else here. Through May 11, Odor saw 52% fastballs. Since May 13, he’s seen 43% fastballs, and that’s the lowest rate in all of baseball. And this, presumably, isn’t unrelated to the plate-discipline numbers above. Odor’s been looking for fastballs, and he’s shown a willingness to over-expand. So pitchers haven’t had to come after him, as Odor hasn’t shown he can lay off of secondary pitches consistently. If anything, too many of the pitches he’s been laying off have been strikes. Everything is all tangled, and the result has been a pretty lousy second baseman.

Odor is better than this, and before long, I assume he’ll start playing better than this. It’s a question of magnitude, and it’s a question of whether Jurickson Profar should slide in every so often. When Odor is running a wRC+ around 110 or 120, you want him in the lineup every day. If he’s more like an 80 or 90, then for Profar, that should be an opportunity. You don’t want to give up on Odor, but Profar needs to play somewhere. Lately, Odor hasn’t done much to fend him off.

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.