In a move that has been widely expected for months, the Phillies announced today that they’re not going to extend Ruben Amaro’s contract, ending his tenure as general manager of the club.

Full release from #Phillies on Amaro: pic.twitter.com/8PZPRC664T

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) September 10, 2015

Amaro has been the Phillies GM since November of 2008. The Phillies won the division each of his first three years in charge, including making it to the World Series in 2009, but have struggled as their core aged and the team was unable to restock the talent pool around their former stars. Amaro was also one of the last holdouts against the move towards analytics, and the Phillies fell behind the rest of the league by resisting the trends toward data-inclusive decision making.

New team president Andy MacPhail will likely look outside the organization for the team’s next GM, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the team went with a younger assistant GM from a team with an analytical bent. Given the Phillies payroll and market size, this is the kind of position that will appeal to a wide variety of candidates, and the Phillies should be able to interview just about anyone they want for the position.

Although I write about prospects on a regular basis, it’s not often I get to see the players I write about in action. However, this year’s 16th-overall pick, UCLA right-hander James Kaprielian, happened to be pitching for the Yankees’ New York-Penn League affiliate in Staten Island, which is just a short boat ride from my office. So I decided I’d get out from behind my computer screen to actually watch some of the players who fill up my hard drive. Luckily for me, the Yankees’ second-round pick, Indiana State left-hander Jeffrey Degano, pitched in relief, giving me plenty of solid pitching to observe. If I had a penchant for scouting, I’d be able to provide you with grades for each of his pitches and command — much like Kiley McDaniel does on the player pages. Unfortunately, my untrained eyes aren’t capable of grading pitches with that type of precision. So instead, I’ll just describe what I saw as best I can, and supplement it with some low-quality video courtesy of my iPhone.

Kaprielian sat 91-94 mph with his fastball, and dialed it up as high as 96 with two strikes. Observe this 93 mph two-strike offering to Bobby Wernes, who had struck out in just 12% of his plate appearances headed into play.

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According to Statcast, this past Saturday Kris Bryant hit the longest home run in Major League Baseball this year. The home run traveled 495 feet with a batted-ball speed of 111 mph and an angle of 33 degrees. The ball careened off the newly installed scoreboard in left field.

Aside from watching the replay, to put the home run into context, I created a hexbin plot that shows Bryant’s home run as an outlier. This graph includes only home runs for which Statcast has published batted-ball data and also were recorded as featuring a distance of 300 feet or greater. (This data set contains only about 75% of total home runs in 2015.) Each hexagon is a bin consisting of a batted-ball speed range and a batted-ball distance range. The color represents how many home runs fall into that bin; the more blue a bin is, the more home runs fall into it. The lack of the bin indicates no home runs for those data points.

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Earlier today, Buster Olney noted on Twitter that the Braves are now pulling up the rear in terms of run differential:

The Braves surpassed the Phillies for the worst run differential in the majors — ATL now -164, PHI -163.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) September 4, 2015

It got me to thinking — a dangerous pastime, I know — that it must be rare that two teams in the same division suck this much at the same time. Turns out, there’s something to that notion. Over at ESPN, we can easily find the run differentials back to 2002. Let’s take a look. Teams in bold are/were in the same division:

Teams With -150 Run Differential Or Worse, 2002-2015

Year	Team 1	RD	Team 2	RD	Team 3	RD	Team 4	RD	Team 5	RD
2015	PHI	-163	ATL	-164
2014
2013	MIN	-174	HOU	-238
2012	CLE	-178	HOU	-211
2011	BAL	-152	MIN	-185	HOU	-181
2010	BAL	-172	KC	-169	SEA	-185	PIT	-279
2009	KC	-156	WAS	-164
2008	WAS	-184
2007	TB	-162
2006	TB	-167	KC	-214
2005	TB	-186	KC	-233	ARI	-160
2004	KC	-185	CIN	-157	ARI	-284
2003	DET	-337	MIL	-159	CIN	-191	SD	-160
2002	TB	-245	KC	-154	DET	-289	MIL	-194	SD	-153

SOURCE: ESPN – http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings/_/sort/pointdifferential/season/2002

A couple of things to note. First, last season was pretty cool, because no one was super awful. That doesn’t happen all that often. But two teams being this bad at the same time in the same division hasn’t happened since 2003. Brewers fans will remember 2003 as the year before Ben Sheets was awesome. Reds fans will remember 2003 as the year when Ken Griffey Jr. was awesome but frequently injured. Well, I guess that was most years Griffey was in Cincy. In any case, things weren’t pretty in either city. Adam Dunn rankled old school devotees with a .215 batting average, Wayne Franklin started 34 games and (I’m just guessing here) a lot of brain cells were murdered with alcohol.

Things haven’t been much better in Atlanta and Philly this season. They’re the first two teams to be this bad in the same division in over a decade. That’s rare. But at least they can take comfort in a couple of things. First, they’re not the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked — do you see that 2003 Tigers run differential? Woof! Second, at least they know that they are not alone. And that’s something. After all, misery needs company.

Since players acquired on or after September 1 are not eligible for their new team’s playoff roster, we saw a small flurry of trades come down the pike last night. The Cubs traded for Austin Jackson, the Royals landed Jonny Gomes, the Giants swung a deal for Alejandro De Aza and the Dodgers acquired Justin Ruggiano and Chris Heisey in separate deals. The Jackson, Ruggiano and Heisey deals all involve the infamous player to be named later, meaning we don’t yet know who’s headed in the other direction. However, the Gomes and De Aza deals both included players who will join their new organizations immediately. Here’s a glimpse at what we might expect from these two players down the road. (Note: WAR figures, unless otherwise specified, indicate total WAR through age-28 season.)

Luis Valenzuela, Atlanta Braves, 5.3 WAR

The Royals sent 22-year-old infielder Luis Valenzuela to Atlanta in the Jonny Gomes deal. After hitting a weak .234/.289/.338 in Rookie-level ball from 2012 to 2014, it appears as though something may have clicked for Valenzuela this year. In 56 games, with all but eight of them coming in Low-A, Valenzuela’s hit .358/.380/.495. His lofty .404 BABIP surely explains much of this success, but his combination of contact (14% strikeout rate), power (.137 ISO) and speed (nine steals in 11 attempts) makes him mildly interesting.

KATOH really likes what Valenzuela’s done this year, and as a result, projects him for 5.3 WAR through age 28, which would have put him 54th on KATOH’s list. (At the time, he did not hit my admittedly arbitrary 200-plate-appearance threshold). Despite the optimism, though, my system gives him just a 56% chance of making the majors, suggesting that there’s a very strong chance he flames out completely. In sum, Valenzuela’s done some impressive things this year, but the onus will be on him next year to prove it’s not a fluke. Here are his top Mahalanobis comps, which include notable middle infielders Ronnie Belliard and Scooter Gennett.

*****

Luis Ysla, Boston Red Sox, 0.4 WAR

In exchange for De Aza, the Giants sent hard-throwing lefty Luis Ysla to Boston. Ysla spent all of 2015 pitching at the High-A level, where he’s split time between the rotation and the bullpen. On the surface, Ysla’s 2015 numbers look pretty poor: 6.21 ERA and 4.52 FIP. But it’s worth noting that he’s performed noticeably better out of the bullpen than as a starter (4.50 ERA vs. 8.81 ERA). Furthermore, since a pitcher’s strikeout rate is the most predictive metric for pitchers in the low minors, Ysla’s 25% strikeout rate (27% as a reliever) makes him somewhat intriguing. However, as a 23-year-old who’s yet to master A-ball, Ysla is extremely fringy.

KATOH pegs Ysla for 0.4 WAR through age 28, with just a 19% chance of even making it to the big leagues. His 2014 numbers from Low-A yielded a similar forecast of 0.8 WAR. His Mahalanobis comps also leave a lot to be desired. Basically, its Brandon Medders, a future backup NFL quarterback and very little else.

The culling of General Managers continues. Today, the Mariners announced that Jack Zduriencik is joining the ranks of Doug Melvin, Dave Dombrowski, and Ben Cherington as executives who lost their jobs because of their team’s 2015 struggles. Coming off an 87 win season and significant off-season expenditures the last few years, the Mariners expected to win this year, and another disappointing season proved too much for Zduriencik to outlast. With five losing seasons in seven years and no playoff berths in either of his two winning years, plus a farm system that looks like one of the worst in the game and a history of mishandling the young talent they did get to the big leagues, the Mariners have decided it’s time for a change in direction.

Zduriencik took over after the 2008 season, bringing now-FanGraphs author Tony Blengino with him from Milwaukee to form a front office that looked like it would attempt to blend scouting and statistical analysis. The first year was a wild success, taking the team from 61 to 85 wins, but it was almost all entirely downhill from there. After the 2010 team flopped, the front office fractured, and the organization pivoted away from valuing defense and began a multi-year obsession with trying to stack the line-up with power hitters. Not surprisingly, that plan never worked particularly well.

The Mariners finally got back to the winning side of things last year, after spending $240 million to lure Robinson Cano away from the Yankees, but down years from Cano, Kyle Seager, and Felix Hernandez this year exposed a group of role players that still weren’t up to contention-level, and the team’s inability to put reasonable backup plans in place for the predictable struggles of guys like Logan Morrison forced the team to deal with replacement level production at a large number of positions.

So now the Mariners will search for a new leader, but like in Boston, it seems more likely that they’ll be looking for someone to turn the ship around quickly rather than lead another rebuild. With Hernandez, Cano, and Nelson Cruz all declining assets, there is likely to still be pressure to try and win with this core before those contracts go south and a rebuild is necessary. Bob Nightengale reported that the team may have interest in White Sox president Kenny Williams, while Ken Rosenthal notes on Twitter that they’ve reached out to former Rockies GM Dan O’Dowd. While the team would likely do better to hire a younger, more forward-thinking GM rather than go with another old-school scout, it seems more likely that the team will hire an experienced executive who will promise to turn this ship around fast.

It’s an organization in an awkward position, not setup well to either win next year or long-term, so the new guy will have their work cut out for them. But the fact that the team is struggling and the farm system is in shambles is why the job is open in the first place.

Wins across the National League and American League aren’t distributed equally. Looking at both current wins and our projected expected wins, the NL has more teams at the extreme ends of the wins spectrum, while the AL is more tightly grouped. The shape of the win distribution is useful because it can create a picture of the league. The AL has 20 more interleague wins than the NL due to the 140-120 AL-NL interleague record, so the AL’s distribution is shifted slightly higher than the NL’s. But the NL’s distribution is more spread out with more teams having either really good records or really poor records. Interestingly enough, one division, the National League Central, has the top three teams, Cardinals, Pirates and Cubs, in its league.

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“Was it Karl Marx,” one might ask drunkenly at a party, “or Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis who memorably declared that ‘The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people’?”

The answer, technically: Karl Marx, in his text Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

The answer, metaphorically: Chris Davis, actually, by means of a foul-ball protest against Sweet Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce in the first inning of tonight’s game versus Kansas City.

If you frequent these internet pages, you may have seen the announcement last month that we are hosting a Meetup tonight at Mead Hall in Cambridge in advance of this weekend’s Saber Seminar. In case you didn’t, I’m reminding you again so that you’re all out of excuses. Here’s the pertinent paragraph:

We’ll be getting started right at 7 pm, at Mead Hall’s upstairs bar, just in time to watch the first pitch of the Royals v. Red Sox tilt at Fenway Park. Generally, there are all sorts of writers from the FanGraphs family of blogs at the Meetup, and this year should be no different. Dave Cameron, David Laurila, Jeff Zimmerman, Chris Mitchell, Bryan Cole, Peter Bonney and myself will be on the premises for sure, as will Saber Seminar co-organizer Chuck Korb.

There will be plenty of your other favorite baseball analysts there as well. Oh, and beer. Did I mention beer? So much beer. (Reminder: You’re supposed to be 21 to attend.) So come join us tonight, it’s going to be a marvelous time!

The video here depicts the last pitch of Wednesday night’s game between Kansas City and Cincinnati, a contest won 4-3 by the Royals. What else the video depicts is a cutter thrown by Wade Davis at 96 mph — for a swinging strike to one of the major leagues’ most talented hitters. Though the author failed to seek Votto’s opinion of the pitch, the following image might provide some insight:

This is the expression a man makes whilst another man relates an anecdote about the time he suffered some manner of testicular injury. It’s also the expression Joey Votto makes, apparently, when he’s just witnessed a pitch featuring an unusual blend of velocity and movement.

The curious reader — and even the dumb author — are both compelled to ask in such an instance: is Davis’s the fastest sort of cutter? And also: if Davis’s isn’t the fastest, then whose is?

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